Dec. 17, 2015

“Three men convicted of murder by arson for a 1980 fire in Brooklyn (were) exonerated on Wednesday….

“What carried the three men into prison was not reliable evidence of an intentionally set blaze, but rather an arson investigation that was more like shamanism than science, rooted in hunches and folklore and disconnected from the dynamics of actual fires. Like the comparisons of bite marks, hair and handwriting, it was a forensic practice that had the authority of white-coat laboratory science but virtually none of its rigor….”

– From “Between Guilt and Innocence, an Evolution in Fire Science”
by Jim Dwyer in the New York Times (Dec. 16)

Hats off to District Attorney Ken Thompson, who moved to vacate the three convictions, citing “circumstantial evidence, outdated science and the testimony of a single, wholly unreliable witness….”

Columnist Dwyer is reminded of a statue at the University of Pennsylvania Law School depicting a mythological Chinese beast believed to have the ability to tell the guilty from the innocent by butting them. Inscribed on its base: “Slow and painful has been man’s progress from magic to law.”

“Slow and painful” indeed. Ask Junior Chandler, who has been imprisoned since April 17, 1987, for committing the magical crime of “satanic ritual abuse.”

Sept. 17, 2012

I don’t doubt that prosecutors asked themselves many questions during the course of the Little Rascals case. “Think it’s gonna rain tomorrow, Nancy?” Or maybe “You want anchovies on yours, Bill?”

On more relevant issues, however, they seem to have been remarkably incurious. For instance….

■ Why did none of the defendants in the state’s biggest sex-abuse case have any history of sex crimes?

■ When sex-abusers of children are almost always men, why were five of the Edenton Seven women?

■ Why was there a complete absence of physical evidence?

■ Why did none of the frequently cited child-porn photographs ever turn up?

■ At a day care where parents came and went often and unpredictably, why did not one adult ever report anything suspicious?

■ Why was every child seen by prosecution therapists determined to have been abused, but none of those seen by out-of-town therapists?

■ When criminal conspiracies almost always collapse at the first offer of a plea deal, why did none of these defendants agree to point a finger at the others?

■ Could it really be just coincidence that these allegations surfaced so soon after a day-care ritual-abuse seminar attended by the Edenton police officer who would lead the investigation?

For prosecutors to have raised such questions, of course, would risk recognizing their career-making case as a colossal sham. Better to stay blindered and to forge ahead….

March 30, 2012

Kee MacFarlane is the notorious therapist who led the ritual abuse scare of the late 1980s (and pioneered the misuse of anatomically correct dolls in interviewing children). In just four months MacFarlane diagnosed more than 360 children at the McMartin Pre-School as abused.

In 2005 she declined to be interviewed by CNN but sent a statement:

“We’ve learned a lot in 20 years about how to interview children for forensic purposes and how to manage complex cases such as this one. It would be a sad commentary if we didn’t learn from such painful experience.”

Not much of a mea culpa – but still more than anyone connected with the Little Rascals prosecution has managed.

Oct. 11, 2015

“Satanism lacks a (Jim) Jones or (David) Koresh. Satanism has no Jonestown, no Waco, no Kool-Aid, no casual point of reference.

“This is because Satanic cults, as imagined in popular culture, do not exist.

“Still, some places across the country – West Memphis, Arkansas; Manhattan Beach, California; Edenton, North Carolina; Austin, Texas – belong to a brotherhood of cities united not by the stunned, silent grief of a tragedy like Waco’s, but by the shame of having left innocent families’ lives in ruin in the fervent pursuit of an imaginary evil….

“The ‘Satanic Panic’ of the 1980s and early ’90s was arguably even more frightening than a typical cult precisely because of this lack of a central figure or place; anybody could have been involved, and nobody was above suspicion….”

– From “Conviction of Things Not Seen: The Uniquely American Myth of Satanic Cults” by Dan Shewan at Pacific Standard (Oct. 8)